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After a while, when things have quieted down in Gehenna, Mammon tries rebuilding that one particular old tavern. The one where he was welcomed long ago, where he kept coming back to be welcomed again and again; the one with something infuriating and intangible in the air, in the cooking smells, in the boisterous laughter. Something he couldn’t have owned, even before it was blown to angelic heavenly smithereens.
The earnestness, the generosity, the tender breakable wildflowers some Devils back in Mammon’s own Tartarus might’ve mistaken for weeds. The tavern’s gone, and there’s a scar in the world where it was, so Mammon raises it back in gold. He rebuilds the scuffed wooden countertops, sleek and shining, gilded, now. He brings in new embroidered tablecloths, the lost, familiar patterns remade in silk and luxurious thread. Those fast-fading wildflowers he was gifted here in Gehenna are reborn in immortal crystal, too: emerald stems with roots that will never drink from any earth, and diamond dewdrops arranged unfalling on petals that catch the light like excessively expensive magic. Greed’s magic, Mammon’s magic. It’s all here.
It's all here, and it isn’t the same. Mammon recreates every detail as well as he can remember it, but better, but lovelier to his eye. He isn’t satisfied with his creations – however comfortable, however beautiful – but even so he opens the tavern to the public. A grand Opening Night party like Gehenna’s never seen. The new tavern swarms with curious, crowding customers, unaccustomed to such decadence, endlessly entertained by the polished aristocratic AI chefs in the kitchen and all the wine options brought in from across Hell. Sweet sparkling wines crackling with popping candy and glitter, carried in from Avisos’s casinos; sultry, lush and secret wines from the tunnels and pleasure-dungeons of Abaddon, leather and stone, torchlight and lace.
The customers crow delight. They snap a thousand pictures, upload videos to HellTube, gather awestruck with their friends. Mammon watches, smirking, from his roped-off VIP table in the corner, exactly where he used to sit back when this tavern was run by an old woman who brought him cheese platters he didn’t even especially like.
Cheese platters that meant so much, truly. That Mammon missed, back in Tartarus, enough to bring his glittering entourage all the way out here again.
The visitors from Gehenna have a lovely time at the Opening Night party, it seems to Mammon. His tavern is, after all, unlike anything else along these quaint narrow streets, lined with creaking painted wooden houses and swaying trees whose thick strong roots spread like tensed veins beneath the walkways, warping the carved old cobblestones. Devils step over those roots as they pass; Gehenna doesn’t mind the organic, the wild, the familiar.
Party-goers roar cackling, bawdy drinking songs long into the night; the AI waiters from Tartarus flit here and there, ever attentive. Beyond the tavern’s windows, those AI waiters are mirrored only by messy breathing things, hellish birds and squirrels and darting alley cats with calico bat-wings. Mammon lounges, enormous, muscles draped in gold and commemorative Gehenna-red, a drink held loose and uninterested in his massive hand. His skin is soft and unscarred, perfumed in a way Gehenna’s King Satan’s never is. His eyes are far away. He’s tasted all the pleasures here, but he knows it isn’t enough. It’s a tribute. It’s a display that can’t capture them, the Devils that died here, that ushered the King of Greed in happily, with worn hands and home-cooked food and candles on the tables that smelled like a meadow. The kind of meadow with weeds scattered here and there, but not on purpose. Not for the novelty of things, like someone might do on a whim in Tartarus.
Mammon shifts, glances through the crowd. He presses his perfect teeth together as if he might grind them the way Satan does. Satan with his long windswept hair and cracked fangs, wide dangerous smiles. Satan who’ll wear cheap costume jewelry because his subjects bought it for him; Satan with a boring treasure hall; Satan who feels weird sitting in a throne. The King of Wrath has things the King of Greed can’t pin down, can’t grasp even with his conjured-up skyscraper-hands, doesn’t he?
Mammon doesn’t actually grind his teeth. He tips back his drink and swallows it all at once, mouth flooding with sweetness and wealth, flecks of gold on his tongue. He waves an AI over, gestures for another drink. He assures Eligos that he did so well decorating the tables; he commends Bimet for the piles of tips he’s gathered, even though there weren’t really supposed to be so many gilded tip jars set out around this tavern. Had there even been a tip jar at all, back when this place was itself?
Before the Devils here were lost. Mammon visited them so many times, was given so many cheese platters, so many seasonal flowers, so many laughing anecdotes about what had been going on lately. He entertains tavern guests until the sun rises, now; the party stretches on and on and none of the taps ever run dry. In the end, after the Gehenna residents here stumble out, trickling back into the street, chuckling and slurring, all that… after Bimet hides away to count his earnings, and Eligos falls asleep gently, cutely under one of the tables, bundled up in lopsided ribbons and one of those silk tablecloths like a blanket… Mammon is alone. He will leave clean-up to his AI helpers, of course. He heaves himself to standing, looks around him. Feels so empty it’s infuriating.
As if conjured up by his smoldering rage, his disappointment, whatever, Satan himself slams the door open soon enough. He lets it thud and clatter so it pounds in Mammon’s head, gets Eligos twitchily jumping in his sleep under the table. Satan bares his crunching fangs, fond and taunting, far more awake than anything Mammon’s ready for just now. He has a red duffle bag slung over his shoulder, covered in fraying patches.
“Mammon!” Satan says. “How’d opening night go? Too bad I had to miss it.”
Mammon tells him about how everything went, how the wines sold, how the menu was prepared, but Satan… as usual, aggravatingly… understands far more than he says. As Mammon talks, Satan begins gathering things out of his duffle bag. A red-wood cheese board decorated with carvings, branches and the initial “S” curling out of them like vines… a few thermoses of bitter black coffee… cheese slabs and a loaf of bread to carve and cook into French toast with butter and eggs and a splash of vanilla. Mammon raises an eyebrow at Satan as he begins cutting that bread with a gleaming knife, obviously the most expensive thing he brought over. Mammon trails off mid-sentence, honestly, as Satan suddenly stabs that knife into the cheese board, remembering something. Satan smacks himself on the forehead, chuckling, and shoves a thermos of coffee into Mammon’s hand before going back to his work.
“You thought it might be like this,” Mammon realizes. “That I’d feel like this. I would try to honor them, and it would turn out… well.”
“Eh, everyone had fun, right?” Satan says. “And you built a fancy memorial, for sure. Bet they wouldn’t hate it!”
“They wouldn’t hate it.” Mammon thinks he might sound sarcastic, echoing Satan's words, but he turns the idea over on his tongue, checking how it tastes. He tries the coffee – he doesn’t care for it. It’s burned, and cheap. But still, there’s an emotion here, an empathy, an intention that isn’t his. That can’t be his. The fact grates on him, of course, but here… on this particular morning… down this particular street... it scratches an itch, too. This, right here. He was looking for this. “Thank you,” Mammon finally says, and Satan smirks. Asks if Eligos and Bimet will want any French toast once he’s finished making it. Mammon nods. Yes. Probably they will.
Satan cooks for him, then, the way the old Devil that used to live here cooked for him. The room fills with the smell of it, no sweeter, no lovelier than anything his AI could do. But something is different, though. If this difference could belong to Mammon, it would cease to exist, like smoke dissolving between his gold-ring fingers.
Mammon watches Satan flip toast, moving casually, unfazed by his golden shining tavern. A smile – like a cat in the sun – spreads over Mammon’s lips. It can’t be grasped, it can’t be claimed, it can’t be forced. But Satan offers it, anyway, as hellish birds wake up and start singing along the street.